Yokohama Yankee: My Family's Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan

Contents

1    The End of a Dynasty

2    Just Another Gaijin?

3    Permission to Adopt

4    A Prussian in Feudal Japan

5    An Unlikely Match

6    Korean Kings & Virginia Gentry

7    Ainoko: The Children in Between

8    Two Months, Two Children, One Family

9    Between Wars, Between Cultures

10    Yokohama & the Earthquake of 1923

11    On the Eve of a New War

12    Return to America

13    Piedmont Helms: Japs!

14    A Bittersweet Homecoming

15    Love & Occupation

16    Mother & the Blind Professor

17    Don & Barbara

18    Betrayed at Work and at Home

19    Moving On

20    A Japanese Cousin and Fellow Traveler

21    From Shame to Pride

22    Looking for Hiro & My Japanese Roots

23    The Biological Imperative

24    Forging a Stronger Bond

25    The View From Another Bluff

      Afterword

Donald Julius Helm 1926-1991.

ACOOL AUTUMN WIND was blowing in from the sea when I reached the Christ Church in Yokohama. At a reception table by the wrought-iron gate, a lady in kimono smiled tentatively as she held down the flapping pages of the guest book while I signed my name. The other receptionist, in a Western dress, opened envelopes filled with ten-thousand-yen bills, and recorded in a separate book the amount contributed by each guest. I hesitated, momentarily ashamed that I had no envelope to give. But I wasn’t expected to contribute. This was a memorial for my father.

September 23, 1991. I had taken the day off from work as Tokyo correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. At the time, my wife, Marie, was in Seattle teaching at the University of Washington, as she had done every other quarter since we had moved to Japan the year before. So I came to the funeral by myself, bringing a pen and notebook as if this were just another assignment.

The memorial of Donald Julius Helm was testimonial to the fading presence in Yokohama of a family that witnessed Japan’s transformation from a feudal nation ruled by samurai into one of the world’s great industrial powers, I might have begun the article. As the owner of the largest foreign-owned stevedoring and forwarding company in Japan, the Helm family had once managed or operated office buildings, apartment complexes, warehouses, cranes, tugboats and barges in every major Japanese port. Helm Brothers was one of a small handful of foreign companies in Japan that had been continuously owned and operated since Japan’s opening to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. It had survived two world wars and a devastating earthquake. The company was founded by my great-grandfather; my father was its last president.

Toshiko, who married Dad soon after my parents divorced in 1973, was dressed in a trim black dress and wore a short string of pearls. She gave me a quick hug and asked me to help greet the guests. I was thirty-five, but as I stood by the gate, I felt like a lost child. I didn’t recognize the people streaming into the church courtyard, so I simply bowed my head as I quietly accepted their condolences. I was mystified by the number of people who came to pay their respects: Dad, only sixty-four when he died, had seen so few people in the final years of his life.

After a while, I left my post and wandered through the heavy doors of the church into the still-empty sanctuary, slipping into the front pew. Below the altar, chrysanthemums and lilies surrounded a large framed photograph of my father taken in Hawaii. His balding head was tan and reflected the light of the flash. He wore a pastel pink and blue Hawaiian shirt and, on his face, the look of mild amusement he often had after a few drinks. That familiar look hinted at inside knowledge of some cosmic joke. You think you’ve got one over on me, but I’m smarter than that, he seemed to suggest.

When I was a young child, Dad seemed like a god to me, both frightening and infallible. Once, a Japanese policeman visited our house and began scolding my friend and me for setting a fire to the grass in an empty lot nearby. Dad, awoken from his Saturday morning slumber, slid open the double-hung window to his second-floor bedroom and stuck his head out. Urusai! (Shut up!), he boomed in a voice so authoritative and contemptuous that the policeman turned pale, gave a quick bow and left.

One day, after settling into his recliner with his glass of Scotch, he exclaimed with a soulful sigh: The goddamned Japanese! He believed that you could never really understand the Japanese so you might as well give up trying. It was an odd sentiment since Dad was half-Japanese.

Growing up in Japan, I never thought Dad looked Japanese in the least. But as I looked at his photograph in the church, I noticed the peaked eyebrows, the almond eyes and the smooth bronze skin. A good-looking man, he could be a real charmer with his wry smile, his graceful manner and his hypnotic voice. I had recently found a photo of him as a twenty-year-old lieutenant standing erect with one hand resting lightly on his left hip. There was something about his posture—shoulders pulled back, head held high—that projected a shy, yet alluring self-confidence. His nose, with a slight bump from a childhood accident, gave him a rakish air. When he took over the family firm at age twenty-seven, with no previous business experience, he might have learned to carry the responsibilities of power. Instead, when business didn’t go as he expected, he became bitter and turned to drink. He retired early and sought affirmation in the daily gyrations of the stock market.

Looking back today, I have some sense of that combination of self-satisfaction and insecurity that Dad must have felt in those early years. When I first came to Tokyo in 1982 as a correspondent for Business Week, I was twenty-six. Frequently invited to speak on Japanese television, I would smugly discuss world affairs as if I were some pundit instead of just a curiosity—a white-faced journalist who happened to speak Japanese.

My Dad and I were similar in another respect. Neither of us had ever been comfortable with our Japanese heritage. When I was eighteen, my brother Chris, two years older than me, told me about an encounter he had had with a great-uncle and aunt. Growing a beard? the aunt had asked Chris, pointing to the peach fuzz on his chin. I can’t really grow a beard, said Chris. Must be my Japanese blood. When the aunt left the room, the uncle turned to Chris with quiet fury: We don’t talk about such things. Our mixed-race uncle who passed for white had never told his Caucasian wife or their children about his Japanese heritage.

When Chris told me the story, I felt as if my eyes had opened for the first time. Of course I was part Japanese! I wear a 6½ EEEE shoe, a size I can find in any Japanese shoe store but not in the largest American outlet. Like my brother, I cannot grow a beard. And, now as I thought about it, I was sure I had heard relatives talk about my two Japanese great-grandmothers. I had simply found it convenient to forget.

Later, I would learn my father had a good reason for denying his Japanese blood. Living in California during World War II, his whole family barely escaped being sent to an internment camp. If I had considered this as I sat in the church pew that September day, I might have felt sympathy for Dad. Instead, I was full of anger and resentment.

When I was a child, Dad had a life force that both attracted and repelled me. He could be generous, even gentle, one minute, but then explode unpredictably, like a faulty firecracker. I kept my distance from him. When Dad left my mother to marry Toshiko halfway through my senior year of high school, I was relieved that my parents’ incessant squabbling would finally come to an end. When I returned to Japan in 1982 to work for Business Week, my wife Marie and I lived just an hour away from Dad and Toshiko, and yet we seldom visited. Dad was still drinking, and I was still afraid of him. On those few occasions we did meet, we played mahjong for money. Mixing, stacking and playing with the bamboo-backed ivory tiles eased the tension. Dad didn’t mind losing to me. He seemed pleased when he could settle his account simply by slipping me a couple of one-thousand-yen notes.

When I returned to Japan for the Los Angeles Times in 1990, just a year before Dad died, he was drinking less and wanted to see me more, but I had little time for him. When I rushed to his bedside after he had a stroke in early 1991, I was shocked to find him in a dilapidated neighborhood hospital. He was babbling, so I leaned in close and heard him say, My sons have no time for me. Even as he lay there barely conscious, I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him.

Dad needed double bypass heart surgery, but I considered the whole Japanese medical system to be an abomination. I had one friend who had almost died because of a mistaken diagnosis and another who nearly had an unnecessary mastectomy. I arranged to have Dad sent to the Stanford University hospital in Palo Alto, California. The surgeon assured us that Dad’s odds of surviving were excellent—ninety-six percent—so I saw no need to accompany him to California for the surgery. The last time I saw Dad alive was at the Tokyo airport sitting in a wheelchair as Toshiko pushed him through the gate toward passport control. I was already thinking of the work that awaited me back at the office. When Dad died on the operating table a week later, I wondered if my distrust of Japanese doctors, indeed of everything Japanese, had contributed to his death.

NOW, THREE WEEKS LATER, FROM my pew in the Christ Church, I watched as the guests began to spill into the sanctuary. My brother Chris, an attorney in Tokyo, and my sister Andrea, who worked for a Japanese travel agency in Portland, sat next to me. My other sister, Julie, a veterinarian in Colorado, couldn’t make it, but we had all been to a memorial in California a week before for Dad’s American friends. The church was now full. Reverend John Berg, who had come from Britain to become pastor while I was still a child, took his place at the pulpit. I had always been fascinated by the way he would lean his head back so that his large Adam’s apple was exposed and would explode into spasms of laughter. He used to take a group of us foreigners Christmas caroling in a tugboat on Yokohama Harbor. We would board a ship at anchor, sing a few songs, have a few drinks and then head for the next ship.

Reverend Berg sniffled and rubbed his big red nose with a handkerchief. It’s the lilies, he explained to the assemblage. I’m allergic. Then he began with a story.

I remember how Don was bringing in some stuff to give to the annual church bazaar when he fell headlong down the steps to the basement. You see, said Berg, looking at the audience with a twinkle in his eye, Don was not very familiar with the geography of the church.

Laughter rippled through the chapel. There must have been two hundred people packed into the church. Dad would have been surprised at the size of the crowd.

The name Helm is synonymous with Yokohama, the reverend went on. The Helm dynasty began when Julius Helm came to Yokohama in 1869. The family played a large part in building up this international city. Berg stopped occasionally during his address to allow the white-robed Japanese pastor at his side to translate his words. We have in the church today Christians, Buddhists and Muslims representing the international nature of Yokohama ...

Like my father, I am not a religious person. So when the reverend said it was time for Dad to go to God and whisper his story in His ear, I grimaced. But when he added, "Maybe others won’t understand, but God will understand when Don opens up his soul to Him," it was as if Berg were talking directly to me, scolding me for closing my heart. I felt a deep, hollow aching and then tears. I was kuyashii. There is no English word for the despair that I felt—that strange combination of resentment, frustration and anger intensified by an immobilizing sense of helplessness.

I was kuyashii about the way Dad acted so defeated toward the end of his life. He was smart and rich. What right did he have to be unhappy? I hated his weakness when things got tough. I thought then of a snapshot I had uncovered of Dad as a teenager, his bony ribs thrust out, wearing a winning grin on his face as he proudly held out a small trout. How did this boy, who seemed to have the world in his hand, become the shrunken soul I had come to know who was happiest after his first couple of drinks in the evening? In that twilight between sobriety and drunkenness, Dad would look up, smile and say, "Ahhh, I feel no pain."

Reverend Berg asked us to stand and sing Nearer, My God, to Thee. The Japanese in the church sang the same hymn in their language. I am climbing the road, God, to be by your side. The two languages melded into a single hum that was comforting in its jumbled incoherence.

Walking through the churchyard afterward, I felt a hand on my arm and turned to find Tsuru-san, my father’s childhood nanny, at my side. She wore a black silk kimono with autumn flowers splashed across the front. Her gray hair was knotted in a bun at the back of her head and it bobbed as she smiled at me mischievously.

I spanked your father’s bare bottom when he was three years old, she told me as she clutched my jacket sleeve in one wrinkled hand and gave it a tug. He was always so naughty. I can’t believe I outlived him. With her other hand, Tsuru-san pulled a handkerchief from her kimono sleeve and dabbed tears from the deep creases around her suddenly reddening eyes. She was more than ninety years old, yet she still maintained the poise that seemed so appropriate to her name, Tsuru, crane, given her as a young girl because of her long white neck.

I recalled Tsuru-san coming to our house in Yokohama once a week to do the sewing. Always dressed in kimono, she spooked me with her stories of the haunted world of old Japan. Once, when a friend and I dug a deep hole in the backyard, Tsuru-san stuck her face out of the doorway. "If you keep digging, the oni will grab your leg and pull you underground," she screamed, quickly ducking back behind the door. We laughed at her nonsense. Who believed in ogres? But we quickly filled in that hole.

Growing up in Yokohama in the 1960s was like that. I seemed forever to be shifting from one dimension to another, like the hero in a science-fiction movie who travels back and forth through space and time. One minute I was in the Western world of logic: If you pushed the spade into the ground, you would get a shovel full of soil. The next minute, I was considering the possibility that the same spade might break through a thin layer of earth to reveal the gleaming eyes of a wicked ogre waiting to pull me into the dark Japanese netherworld.

From the churchyard, I could see the beer garden across the alley, not twenty yards away, where our house had once stood. My parents would throw lavish parties in our large garden. Paper lanterns strung across the yard would sway in the summer breeze, casting wavering light on the well-dressed men and women. Half a dozen Japanese maids in uniform would weave through the crowd serving men their Scotch and women their gin and tonics. All that remained of that compound now was a low wall made of a much-prized yellow volcanic stone called oyaishi. There was never a nameplate outside our house as there were on other foreign residences because Dad feared the Helm name would tempt someone to kidnap his children for ransom.

Our house had been at the center of the Yokohama foreign enclave called The Bluff, where weathered Victorian homes lined the streets along with the occasional two-story townhouse built during the US Occupation as military housing. Within two blocks of our home there were three schools, a hospital, a fire station, a church and a cemetery, all built for foreign residents. I used to joke that you could be born, christened, schooled, rescued from a fire, hospitalized, memorialized and buried without ever going more than a block from our house.

That was the way it was supposed to be. When Japan’s shogun, under pressure from Commodore Mathew Perry and the cannons on his massive black ships, had ended Japan’s two and a half centuries of isolation in 1854, Japan had sought to limit foreign influence by restricting foreigners to this special settlement, once a tiny fishing village.

Over the next century, a port city of several million grew up around that foreign enclave. Japanese visitors would come to The Bluff in big buses like tourists to a foreign land. Giggling Japanese school girls on class trips would point at me with my blond hair and exclaim: "Ah, gaijin da! Look, there’s a foreigner! Japanese boys in their black school uniforms would stick their heads out of bus windows and yell out: Hey you! You Yankee boy! Disu izu a pen!"

Growing up in Japan as a foreigner, a gaijin, that outsider status became a central part of my identity. Everywhere I went, strangers would pull me into their group pictures, like the fake geisha who are paid to walk the streets in Kyoto so tourists can photograph scenes of old Japan. Only now do I realize how odd it was to grow up like that, always on display, separated from the society around me. For the first time, I understood that the foreign settlement in which I grew up, the place I had called home, was an anomaly destined to fade away. Dad’s death had cut the last strand linking me to that world of my youth. And for the first time, I realized that for all its strangeness, it was a world I had loved deeply, and its absence left me aching.

Across from the church, facing the harbor, was a large park where I played as a child. Waves of nostalgia rocked me. Every spring, clouds of cherry blossoms burst forth, drawing large groups who, ostensibly there to view the blossoms, seemed more intent on drinking and singing late into the night. The min min min meeeeeeeeeee of cicadas filled the woods in summer, and I used to capture the insects with bits of well-chewed gum stuck to the end of a bamboo pole. How strange that these insects lay dormant underground for seventeen years before casting off their shells to live in the world for a few short weeks. I have since learned the cicada is a Buddhist symbol of rebirth. One poet compares their cast-off shells to the hollow shell of human greatness.

I was still standing in the church courtyard when Toshiko interrupted my reverie to introduce me to three men whose deeply tanned faces and hands seemed at odds with their white shirts and black suits. One of the men had been a carpenter at Helm Brothers. He remembered fondly how Dad had taken the time to teach him proper manners so he could play golf without embarrassment at the fanciest courses. These men had lost their jobs at Helm Brothers when Dad’s relatives forced the sale of the company in 1973.

The men were there to pay their last respects to Dad, but also to Helm Brothers, a family business that had sustained their families for generations. Helm House, a block of apartments and offices my grandfather built, had, at various times, been Helm Brothers’ headquarters, the home of foreign diplomats, the headquarters of the German navy, the home of US Eighth Army officers during the Occupation and the home of the Yokohama Police Department. Now it was just a nameless office building. There were a half dozen real-estate companies that still used the Helm name, but none had anything to do with us. The new Taiwanese owners of Helm Brothers, I was told, had been involved in shady dealings. In the opening scene of a Japanese thriller I read, a corpse is found in an apartment managed by the Heim (sic) Brothers, which is described as a seedy international company.

As dusk descended and the courtyard emptied, family and friends gathered a couple of miles away at the modest house where Dad had moved with Toshiko after my parents’ divorce. The house sat several feet below the level of the street and it felt like an earthquake every time a bus passed. Before land prices began to plummet in 1990, this little house, the last remaining piece of the family’s once extensive real estate holdings, was itself worth a substantial fortune.

As I slipped off my shoes in an entryway already crowded with black leather shoes, I could hear laughter. I remember the time he shot a hole in one, said one of Dad’s former employees. That cost him plenty! According to Japanese tradition, a golfer who got a hole in one was obligated to buy gifts for all his golf partners. Dad had not skimped on the gifts. Insurance companies would later offer hole-in-one insurance to cover such rare occurrences.

I poured myself a glass of Kirin and sat down in the dining room. Before long Itoh-san, a former employee of Dad’s, stood next to me. I remembered him as a thin, confused young man who seemed to tremble before my father. Now he was a sizable man with a protruding belly and a smug, knowing look.

Itoh began to reminisce about the early 1960s, when Dad broke away from Helm Brothers to launch his own business. He helped me buy my first piece of property, Itoh recalled. Don said we should know what it was like to be a landlord if we were going to be in the real-estate business.

As Itoh continued to drink, his face darkened. I was completely against the divorce, he said. Your relatives liked your mother. Your father lost the support he needed to keep Helm Brothers in the family when he left her.

It felt like Itoh wielded a poker and was messing around among Dad’s dead ashes to see if there were any live embers, to see if he could get a rise out of the man who had frequently humiliated him.

Perhaps Itoh spotted my unease because he suddenly changed his tone. Don was just too honest. He didn’t like doing things in an underhanded way, Itoh said. It’s just too bad; you could have all been rich.

AFEW WEEKS LATER, MY brother Chris and I went with Toshiko to the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery to visit Dad’s new grave. The tombstone, a flat block of polished black granite, was tucked against the shrubbery that lined the northern border of the cemetery. At a nearby water tap, Toshiko filled a blue plastic bucket with water and grabbed a couple of the scrub brushes available for visitors to use. While we watched, she squatted down and scrubbed Dad’s gravestone. After a few minutes, she handed each of us a brush. I thought it was pointless cleaning the shiny surface of this spotless new stone, but I went through the motions. Meanwhile, Toshiko arranged the flowers she had brought and placed them in the stainless steel vase at the foot of the gravestone.

See, Don? Your children are here, she said, looking adoringly at the gravestone. Isn’t it nice? They are scrubbing your back.

I cringed. I had never been that close to Dad when he was alive. After putting away the bucket and scrub brushes, we stood in front of the grave to pray. My palms felt awkward pressed together like that—two parts of me that were unaccustomed to each other. What was I supposed to do? Pray to God? Talk to Dad’s spirit? I was relieved when Toshiko raised her head and it was time to go.

In the weeks that followed, I spent much of my time dealing with my father’s estate. I was discussing business with the man who had become the president of Helm Brothers after my father left. I took the opportunity to ask him if he was aware of any Helm Brothers records.

The man looked at me stiffly. I used to worship every day before the picture of your great-grandfather, but your family betrayed us, the man replied with a bitterness that startled me. Sure, there were documents. Helm House was filled with documents when your father sold the company. We had them all sent to the dump.

ONE EVENING ABOUT A MONTH after the funeral, I was browsing the magazines on display at a train platform kiosk when I saw the banner headline on a copy of the Bungei Shunju, an intellectual journal. Kenbei, it read—contempt for America. I bought it and flipped to the special report. My heart quickened as I began reading the essays. This was incredible! Here were Japan’s leading industrialists and intellectuals declaring that the United States was a nation in decline. The chief executive of a giant electronics company said he wouldn’t buy American semiconductors because they were shoddy. A Japanese novelist said the noble America she had once admired had turned into a self-centered bully. An economist advised the United States to focus on its one true expertise: farming.

I thought of what Miyazawa Kiichi, the newly appointed prime minister, had told me in an interview just a few weeks before. His greatest fear, he had said, was that America, incapable of competing fairly with Japan, would start a trade war by blocking the import of Japanese products. Miyazawa’s low regard for American industry, I realized, was another symptom of this growing disdain for America.

Japan’s attitude toward the West had always swung like a pendulum. Western merchants and priests were welcomed into the country from Portugal in about 1543, only to be thrown out a century later. When Christian converts in Japan refused to renounce their faith, they were massacred by a newly isolationist government fearful of outside interference. In the mid-1800s, the rallying cry of drive out the barbarians that followed Commodore Perry’s arrival was supplanted by the wholesale importation of Western institutions and technology a few decades later under the Meiji emperor. In the militarist Japan of the 1930s, Westerners were reviled, but following the nation’s humiliating defeat in World War II, everything American was worshipped. My family’s fortunes in Japan had risen and fallen with those tides.

In those first two decades after World War II, when I was growing up in Japan, the Japanese rushed wholeheartedly toward everything American, but they were a cowed people. In A Nation of Sheep, a short story by Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo published in 1958, Japanese men seated in a bus are too intimidated to stop American soldiers from taunting a Japanese college student. Reading the story for the first time in a Japanese literature class in college, I remember identifying with the student. I hated the American soldiers for being such bullies, and I felt contempt for the Japanese men on the bus who refused to defend the boy.

As someone with deep roots in Japan, I was glad to see the Japanese finally stand up for themselves. America was a bully. Yet,